Through the means of mass petitioning William Wilberforce, who led the campaign in the Commons, hoped to exert pressure on Parliament to abolish the slave TRADE. The strategy almost worked; in 1792 the House resolved by 230 votes to 85 that the TRADE ought to be gradually abolished. But petitioning on this scale was always likely to cause alarm in the minds of men with one eye on events in France. Ultimately, radicalism was to prove the Achilles heel of the early abolitionist movement. The rising tide of revolutionary violence in France and, with it, the growth of political reaction at home, inevitably took its toll. In 1793 the Commons refused to revive the subject of the slave TRADE, effectively reversing the resolutions of the previous year.